When Activision / Infinity Ward came out with the Stimulus Map pack near the end of March, they were charging $15 (1200 Microsoft Points) to download the map pack. I already paid $60 for the game and wasn’t too happy about spending 25% of the original game cost to buy the map pack but I did. What I found is that I had more fun playing the maps that came with the original game instead of the maps in the Stimulus package, which two out of the five maps are from a previous version of Call of Duty. The problem for me is most of the on-line players were only playing the new maps and not many were playing the original maps anymore. After playing the new maps for about a week or so, I haven’t played it since. It’s not that the maps are bad but the $15 price put a bad taste in my mouth and it has turned me off of the Xbox 360 overall.

Now, fast forward to June and they have released another map pack, called the Resurgence Pack, for another $15? What are they thinking? I don’t mind paying developers and software companies for their work, I always have and always will, but this is type of business practice is nothing more than consumer price gouging as far as I am concerned. I know that a lot of people will buy this map pack, maybe even a few million, like when the first map pack was released I would guess. I hope everyone who buys it enjoys it but don’t be upset if they keep releasing map packs every couple to few months for $15 and the $60 game you bought soon costs as much as the hardware it is being played on. If it was $5, I would consider it fair but $15 is just too much to ask of a gaming community that has made them so successful.

When it’s time for me to play games, I will spending a lot more time playing Team Fortress 2 on my PC and much less time on my Xbox 360.

I was extremely impressed by the theme layout and went to StudioPress.com to see how much it would cost to purchase that theme template.  When I entered their website, I saw the theme I was looking at and found that it would cost around $79.  After looking at some of their other themes, I found their Pro-Plus All Theme Package for $250.  This package included, not only the theme that I wanted but all current and future themes that they might release.

I fought with spending $250 on WordPress themes but I took a chance and have no regrets.  Not only did I get access to all of their themes, they also have comprehensive support and tutorials that cover how to use and personalize their themes.

Some of the features that sold me are:

• Updated themes and access to future theme releases
• SEO optimized themes
• Theme options page in WordPress for simplified configuration
• Themes can be used as many times, on as many websites a I want, including client websites
• Themes can be modified as much as I want
• Comprehensive support and tutorials

The current theme on this website is StudioPress’s Magazine theme.  I spent about five or six total hours modifying this theme to my liking and installing and configuring some WordPress plug-ins that I wanted.  I used to spend weeks working on free themes or modifying standard themes to work with much less functionality than I have with this theme.

One thing to remember, even though StudioPress has made it easy to setup and customize their themes, you still need a good understanding of WordPress and some web programming knowledge.  Also, to change colors or font styles, you will need some knowledge of CSS too.

I am so impressed, I  signed up to be an affiliate for StudioPress.  I normally don’t endorse products but I am a very satisfied customer and think that they have something that other theme vendors do not come close to offering.

Like I mentioned in a previous post here, Spend time on your content and let someone else take credit for your theme. Using these themes from StudioPress is allowing me to practice what I preach.

Click here to visit StudioPress.

I guess I need a support group of some sort…

Recently, I was taking some time out to relax and for some reason, I started thinking about how much time I am spending on Facebook.  I don’t update my status too often but I am connected to Facebook almost 24×7.  I have Facebook access, not only on my computer but also on my cell phone.  I can poke people, play games and read my friends post from pretty much anywhere and at almost any time.

The thing I cannot understand is why do I do it.  I get up in the morning and check my wall along with half a dozen time wasting games that I play throughout the day and night.  Before I go to bed, I make sure that I do things in the time based games on how long I plan on sleeping.  I make sure that I am ahead in points or levels in the games against my wife and friends but I am not sure why I do it.  I don’t get any income or real satisfaction from doing it but I cannot stop doing it either.

From Mafia Wars to Fish Life to FarmVille and MyZoo, I can’t stop clicking on those applications.  Why?  I don’t know but I do know that if I applied all the time that I spend on those games to my blogs, I would have 20 or more posts per day!

For now, I am going to try to limit my Facebook time to only a few minutes an hour and hopefully I can get to the point where I only check it a few times each day.  I had an easier time stopping smoking than I am kicking this addiction.

Are you finding yourself doing that same thing?  Do you spend too much time on Facebook?  Leave a comment and let me know.  Maybe we can start our own on-line support group for Facebook addicted users and spend our time on there too.

Apple gets it….

As much as I hate to pay so much for Apple’s high priced gadgets, I have to admit that they really do have the end user in mind.  For example, you buy an iPod, go to Apple’s website and download iTunes and install it, plug the iPod in and away you go.  If they have an update, a box pops up when you bring up iTunes and it asks if you want to install it.  If you click “yes” it brings up the end user agreement, you click “accept” and away it goes.  It’s so easy, I would guess a caveman could do it.

Microsoft, have you looked at iTunes….

Don’t get me wrong, I really like my Zune player.  I feel that it sounds better then my iPods, both the second generation  iTouch and the third generation Nano, and it has a really good looking screen.  The user interface on the zune is no where near as easy as the iPod but it works well enough when you get used to using it.  The Zune Market Place cannot hold a candle to the iTunes store but it is functional and the subscription service is excellent if you want to rent songs and not buy all of them.

Here is the problem…

So you are wondering why am I picking on Microsoft when the Zune is a decent product?  Tonight, I wanted to sign into the Zune Market Place to look for a song that I heard in a video.  I brought up my Zune software and when I clicked the sign in button, it said that I had to agree to the new terms of service agreement.  No big deal, right?  Wrong!  I clicked on the terms of service link and it opened my internet browser.  Since I will not use Internet Explorer, which is the topic of a future post here, clicking the link opened up FireFox, which is my default browser and it gave me some cryptic error.  Luckily, I realized that it opened Firefox and I was able to copy the URL from my browser, past it in Internet Explorer and sign into Zune.net.  From there, I was able to accept the terms of service and then sign in on my Zune software to find out the song I was looking for is not available.  I did end up finding the song on Amazon though but there’s another story.

Why couldn’t Microsoft have the terms of service agreement built into the Zune software instead of making users open up a browser and sign into Zune.net?  I am sure that they have more than enough programmers who can figure out how to do this, I would guess.

If Microsoft plans to take market share away from Apple, they should at least make the user experience the same or better than their competition.  I guess it isn’t a big deal since I was able to figure out this problem pretty easily but for those that aren’t too tech savvy, it might be a big deal and give them another reason to buy an iPod and not a Zune when it’s time for a new portable music player.

Fast forward to September 8, 2009 and suddenly there was an official Facebook application for the Android Platform.  Not only was it more than just a wrapper of the mobile Facebook website, it was an actual application written for the Android platform and it is free.

Since I am a somewhat heavy Facebook user I couldn’t find any satisfaction in the other Facebook applications.  There is even a paid Facebook application that started out with good intentions but soon and quickly went downhill.

As you can guess, I was really excited to try the new application and ended up installing it almost as soon as it showed up in the Android Market Place.  Within seconds after install I was logged in and reading my feed.  Most of the other apps that I used often took 30 seconds or longer to load my feed, even on the the 3G data network but this application loaded my feed in just a couple of seconds.  I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me but it has been consistently fast over the last five days that I have been using it.

Some of the main features are;

• Reading your feed.
• Reading and posting to your wall.
• “Like” from the main feed.
• View user (friends) information.
• Take, upload and attach a comment to photos.
• Upload photos stored on your phone.
• You can also post from the main feed page.
• It is free.

There are also other settings for notifications and the way the application behaves;

• You can refresh the feed by shaking the phone.
• Message notification.
• Poke notification.
• Friend request notification.
• Event invite notification.
• Other features like vibrate, phone LED and ring-tones for notifications.

There are a couple of things that aren’t integrated into the application.  When you get messages, poke or other notifications and select them, it opens the internet browser and takes you to the mobile Facebook website (m.facebook.com), which seems kind of clunky but it is functional.  I am hoping, as the application matures, it will have many of those features integrated into the application itself but only time will tell.

Now that I can use Facebook on my Android phone, my thoughts of trading my G1 in for an iPhone have been put behind me.  The Android platform has a long way to go before it can stand up next to Apple and their iPhone mountain but I feel that this effort will bring Google a few feet closer to the top.

Oddly enough, I noticed a commercial saying that Bob Barker, from The Price is Right, was going to be the guest host on September 7th.  This really peaked my curiosity and I ended up tuning in to see what this was all about.  Suddenly, I found myself watching the show again and was surprised at what a good job the WWE did by having Bob Barker as a host.

The concept behind this was that the wrestling matches for the show were picked by wrestling game contestants, much like those games played on The Price is Right.  I don’t know if many of the younger younger crowd watched The Price is Right but many of us more worldly (older) people used to watch it pretty regularly.

Everyone is wondering what my point is and what this has to do with anything.  What I saw here was an excellent marketing ploy.  Here you have Bob Barker, who was the host of  The Price is Right game show, for 35 years on WWE RAW doing the game show format with the wrestlers.  This idea really brings thinking outside the box to a new level and although I don’t have statistics on how many viewers they had tonight, I would guess that it was on the higher end of the viewership scale.

Bob Barker even gave his signature line, “Help control the pet population and have your dog or cat spayed or neutered” and he was also able to talk about his new book, Priceless Memories.  Not only did the WWE use a TV icon to attract viewers, Bob Barker was able to market his book and promote his animal rights cause in front of a full arena in Chicago and to all the people watching the show on cable.

Based on Nielsen ratings from August 24th, WWE RAW had over 5.5 million viewers and I would guess that even the best marketing companies would have a hard time reaching that many people unless they are willing to pay many millions for adds during the Superbowl.  Overall, I think this is an interesting concept and I have read that RAW has some other guest hosts lined up in the coming months.

How does this apply to blogging?  In simple form, you could go find a guest to write a blog post or do an on-line interview and then allow them to market their product or cause on your blog?  This person could be someone who is well known in your blog niche or someone from outside your niche that offers their opinion or skills to help make your blog reach more people.

I am sure there are other ways to apply this concept and I would like to hear your thoughts.

You can also get ideas about concepts that you might never have thought about.  One such concept is having people use a term or word that catches on.  What I mean is, for many years, when people said they needed to make a copy of something, they would say “let me take a Xerox of that piece of paper”  or “go to the Xerox machine and make me 10 copies.”  If you were using a Ricoh or Kodak copier, people still used the term Xerox.  Another good example is Google.  How many times have you heard someone say “I will Google that.”  Even though you might use Yahoo or MSN to do the search almost everyone I know says Google when they want to search for something on the web.  These types of synonyms have an impact on our minds and sometimes, I am not sure that we know were are using them because they are used almost automatically at times.

Why couldn’t we use these associations with other things?  What other things you ask?  A friend of mine, who I met through Plurk.com named Rob is using that same idea.  Rob has a website related to all things about blogging called, you guess it, bloggeries.com.  His idea is to have us use the term bloogeries as a synonym for blog post.  Every time was make a reference to a blog post, he suggests we use the term bloggeries.  The neat part about this is that people are doing it.  I have even found myself doing it when talking about posts.  The way that Rob has marketed this idea has kept it in my mind when I am writing bloggeries like this one.

This just shows how a simple idea and the use of social media to share it can turn something simple into the next big thing.  Hopefully many of you can come up with something similar and create your own synonym for your passion too.

While I was searching Google I happened upon the ScribeFire website. What I found was a full featured blog editor that integrates with FireFox. With ScribeFire, I can write posts and edit my blog from with my browser. It doesn’t seem to allow me to save comments like I was searching for but it seems to do some other things pretty well.

For writing a simple post like this one, ScribeFire more than fits the bill and I have a feeling that I will be using this instead of the admin panel on my blogs. It also offers some nice features that allow you to easily insert images and YouTube videos with a simple mouse click.

I need to spend some more time working with it but for now, I like it and I think you will too.

Do any of you feel that your world has gotten smaller?

For the longest time, I wanted to create my own custom theme for my WordPress blogs. I spent hours working on the classic theme, trying to make it look like I wanted but for some odd reason, it never turned out how I expected.

All this time I spent working on my themes is time lost writing content. Instead of doing what I really enjoy, writing, I was playing with code. Even though I have been designing and maintaining websites since 1998, I just couldn’t come up with a design that I was happy with. Finally, after installing the automatic WordPress update plug-in, more about that later, I went to http://themes.wordpress.net/ and started browsing the hundreds of really nice theme designs. I finally picked a couple, for this blog and a couple of my other blogs.

Because I now have a design that I can live with, I can spend more time writing content instead of trying to inflate my web designers ego. I was so caught up in making an original design, I forget why I setup my blogs in the first place.

A nice theme is good but good content is better.

I ended up wasting nine months on this blog alone because I could not come up with what I felt was a good enough design when I should have just been working on my content, like this post here. If you are a blogger / web designer and cannot create a design that you really like, just pick one of the excellent themes scattered around the internet and start putting your time into your content instead of your design.